deer, and in flavour rivalling the best mountain mutton. This
great waste was once covered with dense forests, in which the wolf, the bear,
the wild boar, and the wild bull were hunted by our Saxon Kings. It is not
among the least wonders effected by the locomotive that a short hour can
transport us from the midst of the busiest centres of manufactures to a
solitude as complete as is to be found in the prairies of America or
Australia, unless we by chance stumble upon a prying gamekeeper or an idle
rustic seeking whortle-berries or snaring hares.

On this chase, begged by his ancestors from an easy king as a kitchen garden,
the hero of the Light Cavalry at Waterloo annually takes his sport, mounted
on a perfect shooting cob, and with eighty years upon his shoulders, can
still manage to bring down his birds right and left.

Long may such blanks of solitude and wild nature remain amid the busy hum of
commerce to remind us of what all England once was, to afford, at a few
holidays in the year, a free breathing place to the hardworking multitude,
and to the poet and student that calm delight which the golden fragrance of a
gorse-covered moor can bestow.

Before we reach Stafford we leave on the right, although not in sight,
Shugborough, the deserted mansion of the Earl of Lichfield, a descendant of
the Lord Anson who "sailed round the world but was never in it."

STAFFORD.

STAFFORD CASTLE, on the summit of a high hill, whose slopes are clothed with
forest trees, gives in the romantic associations it awakens a very false idea
of the town to be found below. The towers of the Castle built by the son of
Robert de Tonei, the Standard Bearer of William the Conqueror, have survived
the Wars of the Roses and the contests of the Great Rebellion, while the
remainder has been restored in an appropriate style by the family of the
present possessors, representatives of the ancient barony of Stafford--no
relation of the Staffords who in another part of the county enjoy the Dukedom
of Sutherland. But the town, prosperous in spite of many changes of fashion,
has completely lost any antique air it may ever have enjoyed, and now, in all
the smugness of brick, quite realises the idea of a borough which at every
election is for sale to the highest bidder.

[STAFFORD: ill18.jpg]

The principal manufacture is that of shoes for exportation. Many remarkable
men have represented Stafford, some as remarkable for their talent as f